San Francisco, CA – May 20, 2010 – GoGrid, a leading Cloud Infrastructure and Hybrid Hosting Provider, today announced that it has named Jeffrey Samuels as Chief Marketing Officer. Samuels brings a proven executive track record in marketing, sales and product management to GoGrid’s leadership team. In this role, Samuels will be responsible for managing and expanding GoGrid’s cloud hosting businesses and driving market adoption at a global level.

Jeff’s impressive energy, vision, and track record make him a great addition to GoGrid,” said GoGrid CEO & Co-Founder, John Keagy. “His experience is uniquely anchored in scaling cloud-based business-to-business product lines. As GoGrid continues to innovate and increase market share in the cloud infrastructure market, Jeff’s leadership will be vital.”

Yesterday, Lead411.com published their list of the fastest growing technology companies in San Francisco and GoGrid was chosen as a winner. Lead411 is a provider of information, news and research about U.S. companies and their executives and they track company news in order to alert customers about venture financing, new hires, hiring plans and other information.

The list of San Francisco companies also receiving the award is impressive, including names such as:

John Keagy, CEO and Co-Founder of GoGrid, spent some time with Detecon’s Thorsten Claus in March 2010 and the interview was recently published in DMR, The Magazine for Management and Technology. In the interview titled “Future of Cloud (IX) – Interview with John Keagy, CEO and Co-Founder of GoGrid and ServePath“, John discusses why he believes that Telcoms will get marginalized if they only concentrate on network buildout as well as what potential partnerships and services could look like.

The full article and interview are available on the Detecon-DMR site as well as below:

GoGrid is one of the most innovative “full service” Cloud providers for over 2000 business customers in more than 100 countries worldwide. Clients include small to medium technology companies, large enterprises, International, Federal, State and local government agencies, and web hosting resellers. Together with GoGrid’s parent company ServePath, GoGrid is able to offer dedicated hosting, public clouds, and a highly flexible hybrid solution, plus a wide variety of managed services that are usually fairly complex and costly to provide, such as disaster recovery, content delivery networks, or load balancing, paired with a “10,000%” Service Level Agreement (SLA) – six minute service outage means ten hours of service credits. Recently GoGrid made its proprietary cloud computing operating system dubbed ‘SkySys’ publicly available to transform existing datacenters into Clouds, allowing multi tenancy including billing, real-time reporting, and support.

DMR: How do you position GoGrid in the market?

John Keagy: From the telecom provider perspective we are next to Amazon the largest Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider with a feature-complete offering. What I mean by that is that we are offering both Linux and Windows servers in the Cloud with integrated cloud storage, integrated load balancing, hourly billing, and we’re doing it for nearly 10,000 customers.

Network World this week published a comprehensive review of 3 GoGrid Partners titled “First-ever test of public cloud management wares” and how their services can be used to monitor and manage Public Cloud resources including GoGrid. In the article, Thomas Henderson and Brendan Allen put RightScale, Tap In Systems and Cloudkick through some fairly rigorous testing to show the strengths (and weaknesses) of each Cloud Management vendor.

Source: NetworkWorld.com

The point of the article is pretty clear to me. We (and Cloud Infrastructure providers Rackspace and Amazon) have been providing Cloud Infrastructure for several years now with 100,000′s combined customers actively using our respective clouds. Obviously, depending on the provider, this process can be quick and easy or a bit more involved. But once you have your infrastructure deployed in the Cloud, how do you monitor and manage it effectively? The authors take this challenge of deploying, managing and taking down jobs hosted in the cloud and discuss their findings within the article.

Summing it all up in a quote:

Our findings in this test are that RightScale impressed us most with its overall control and deep understanding of specific cloud vendors like Amazon. Tap In Systems has more breadth in terms of different clouds that can be used, it’s just not as easy to use. And we liked Cloudkick for its simplicity and ease of use.

An interesting article was posted to the Outsourcing Journal that is relevant to anyone considering using the Cloud as a viable infrastructure strategy. There are plenty of important topics & points in this article, especially as many companies begin moving full infrastructure to the Cloud. Using cloud infrastructure hosting provided by GoGrid and the CloudIQ platform by GoGrid partner, Appistry, companies can move their applications into the cloud for free[1].